Successful businesses identify and execute standard processes on a consistent basis. Each process has an end goal in mind. To be effective, business processes should we well-thoughtout, structured, documented and communicated with your team.
Here’s a look at six tools designed to boost workflow, productivity and overall performance.
“For early-stage startups, simple business process flowcharts (drawn using MS Visio) could help manually streamline processes. As your business grows and internal processes become more complex, one tool I would recommend implementing is Integrify. It’s an enterprise-level workflow and business process management tool that allows you to create and automate workflows from HR to Finance.”
– Vishal Shah, NoPaperForms @vbs27
“In our company, Salesforce is more than just our CRM — it’s our business platform. One of its key features is called Workflows, which are automation rules. For every business process automated with a workflow, we have added the notes directly in the system. This saves us time from having to look up a description elsewhere. Build your documentation right into the business process system itself.”
– David Ciccarelli, Voices.com, @davidciccarelli
“Wrike provides a space for us to not only document, but also brainstorm, bounce ideas and work back and forth, collaborate, submit for review and so much more. It is the perfect hub for a team that includes remote employees because we can all easily access tasks (past, present and future) on multiple different devices. Wrike keeps us in check and organized.”
– Miles Jennings, Recruiter.com @milesj
“Pictures and images enhance the understanding that employees have of the company’s systems and processes. By using images (e.g. flowcharts), a company can help its employees develop a comprehensive understanding of how business is conducted. Microsoft Visio also provides a great tool for collaboration among team members, as well as encouraging all participants to ask the question, ‘Why do we do it this way?'”
– Christophor Jurin, Construct-Ed, Inc. @chrisjurin
“Confluence is the standard for wikis because of how easy it is to use and cross-link material. We use it to share links for discussion, capture plans, and create business processes, and its searchability makes it easy to find information. Its Gliffy integration also makes it easy to diagram, draw workflows or present visual information as well.”
– Charlie Gilkey, Productive Flourishing @charliegilkey
“We use Asana as our project management tool in all departments. For processes that we repeat (e.g. onboarding a new hire), we create template projects in Asana with all the necessary steps, including who the task should be assigned to and what the dependencies are. The templates can be updated by anyone and are constantly evolving as we improve.”
– Bhavin Parikh, Magoosh Inc @bkparikh
This article has been edited.
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